Peter Friederici
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Articles by Peter Friederici
Letter from Home: Zeroing out
During the same week in June, two freakish things happened. A rare but welcome incursion of monsoon moisture entered Arizona from the south, scattering welcome showers across parched forest and grassland, but also throwing down lightning bolts that set off dozens of wildfires. Elon Musk, meanwhile, became the world’s first trillionaire, reaching an unprecedented milestone in the lengthy annals of human accumulation.
Letter from Home: Springing back
There isn’t a lot of time for reflection as the spring semester winds down, so thick is the calendar with projects and presentations and heaps of grading decisions to make, but in late April there were some mornings when the cool temperatures and bursting green leaves brought to mind wistful thoughts of a long-ago spring that for me was also defined by the seductive promise of an idealized college campus.
Letter from Home: Thirty years, and counting
I first heard about the Master of Liberal Studies program at NAU not long after I moved to Flagstaff, from the person of a woman whom I would eventually marry. "Well, that sounds interesting," I thought, adding it to the list of things I found interesting about her. The program was focused on good and sustainable communities, she said.
Thirty years, and counting
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Letter from Home: Plunge
The night the police helicopter dropped from the west Flagstaff sky I was lying in bed, trying to get my mind off the disturbing flow of local news updates by immersing myself in a long magazine article. The piece was about Greenland.
Letter from Home: ISO season, cold but beautiful
As someone who lives at high elevation by choice, I know the happy truth that those of us who are lucky enough to live up here are simply closer to the sky than most other people. Which, according to my dermatologist and eye doctor alike, is not always a good thing. But I will take the trade, paid off in fresh air, mountain vistas, nighttime dark skies. Get up high enough, in other words, and you might be able to visit winter in the terrain where it currently chooses to dwell.
Letter from Home: Interstate vignettes
I suppose the great majority of Americans in the modern era have grown up in relationship with the interstates. With the exception of those living in extremely urban or extremely rural places, residents of the Lower 48 are seldom truly far from a tie-in to the seemingly endless web of superhighways that ties the country together, with its accompanying membrane of Super 8 motels, super truck stops and tourist traps, and super-sized soda dispensers.
Earth Notes: Chino Valley’s Fred Harvey Farm
An English immigrant named Fred Harvey began serving meals to railroad passengers on the Great Plains almost 150 years ago. Since then, the “Harvey Houses” he established remain a byword for both good food and a vanished age of rail travel. But where did all those ingredients for the hotels and dining cars come from? One answer lies in Chino Valley. Beginning in 1913, a bustling farm near Del Rio Springs began provisioning Fred Harvey restaurants in and around northern Arizona.
Monitoring Old Growth in Frequent-fire Landscapes
Ecology and Society: Monitoring Old Growth in Frequent-fire Landscapes You must view this manuscript with a frames-capable browser
Letter from Home: Language power
As someone who has transitioned from reading a paper copy of the Arizona Daily Sun to the wan substitute of flipping its pages on my laptop while drinking my morning coffee, I was interested a couple of weeks ago to note that two entire virtual pages were taken up by a text-heavy announcement from our friendly local electricity provider. Arizona Public Service (APS), it appeared, is angling for a rate increase, which if approved would become the fourth in 10 years.
Letter from Home: Flagstaff's best short walk
Sometimes a long walk is in order, not least for those who make a habit of inquiring about humanity's proper place in the world. "This is my master's library, where he keeps his books, but his study is out of doors," William Wordsworth's servant is supposed to have said to a visitor to the poet's house in the Lake Country of England.
Bricks
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Letter from Home: Smoked
At first glance, it was apparent that the Englishman was a far more serious cyclist than any of us. He wore a skintight body suit emblazoned with a heraldic red rose icon and the word “Lancashire” in huge letters. His bike was sleek, expensive and immaculately outfitted with state-of-the-art panniers, and he had the slightly mincing walk that cyclists affect when they are strolling around in their hard-core, and hard-soled, cycling shoes.
Mather Point, Grand Canyon
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Earth Notes: Monsoon Science, Summers of the Future
In May the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide exceeded 430 parts per million for the first time in recorded history. That’s bad news for many ecosystems and for human communities and societies that rely on them. But there might be a silver lining for residents of the Southwest who like rainy summers. Climate change already affects summer conditions in the Southwest. Higher temperatures mean that moisture evaporates more rapidly, and soils and plants dry out quicker.
Earth Notes: Monsoon Science, Seeding the Rain
This is the second segment of a three-part series on the monsoon. View the first part here. Rain comes when water molecules in the atmosphere clump together to form ice crystals or water droplets that are heavy enough to fall to the ground. But what causes that clumping to happen? It turns out rainfall, including the Southwest’s summer monsoon storms, depends on tiny particles.
Earth Note: Monsoon Science, The Winter-Summer Dance
Winter storms and the summer monsoon season are the ying and yang of the Colorado Plateau: snowstorms are cold and often wide-ranging, while summer rains are usually warm, patchy and irregular. But the wet seasons echo one another in another way. Meteorologists have identified a pattern that brings hope to those longing for a lush summer this year. They found that poor monsoon seasons often follow wet winters, while dry winters (like this year’s) are often followed by bountiful summer rains.
Letter from Home: Tending fire
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Letter from Home: Tending fire
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Letter from Home: Tending fire
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Letter from Home: Shooting the moon
I never learned to be much of a poker player. In school the game we played during lunch periods or at other odd free times was spades, about which I remember very little. No matter. Another game sticks much more in my memory, and it’s one that I still play on occasion with family and friends: hearts. For those not familiar, hearts is a lower-case-t trump game in which the goal is to avoid scoring points, which mostly accrue when you end up with heart cards in a hand that you have just won.
Letter from Home: Dry winter
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Letter from Home: Dry winter
Every year around midwinter I seem to find myself back down in the Sonoran Desert for a spell, if only to shake off sub-freezing temperatures and remind myself what the warmth of the sun feels like. This year, it was a several-day trip that I took to Yuma a week ago. The immediate purpose was to see in person how the midwinter production of leafy green vegetables is organized on farms there.
Letter from Home: Blue light special
The annual appearance of holiday lights in Wheeler Park is one of those seasonal manifestations of civic effectiveness that, like snow plowing and maintaining the water and sewer lines, are easy to take for granted. But I want to take a public stand here and state that it’s gotten better over the years, the chains of lights climbing high enough into tree canopies that I marvel at the physical and technological dexterity of those who install them.
Letter from Home: Dammed
There wasn’t a good place to be in the days after the election. For someone who believes that the candidate we’ve just elected disqualified himself years ago when he forsook his oath to defend the Constitution by choosing to watch TV while his supporters ransacked the Capitol, there was no escaping a sickening feeling of doom, or a feeling of uncanniness that tens of millions of fellow citizens somehow felt OK enough about that option to fill in that particular bubble on their ballot.
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Letter from Home: Getting the wood in
Last Saturday I got to spend the entire wearisome but beautiful afternoon gathering firewood in some of Flagstaff’s vast pinon-juniper hinterlands. It’s a friend’s land, out in drive-by country, where on a weekend afternoon the pace of traffic on Highway 64 makes it clear that there are a lot of time-stressed travelers out and about—in this case, either heading into Grand Canyon National Park for scenery, or back into town for a shower and a filling meal.
Letter from Home: Early
In August, the ticking of the world’s clocks grows ever louder. In part that’s due to the looming closeness of the school year, a tangled cliff that’s always been present at the edge of summer’s smooth plateau (and that through my lifetime has come to begin ever earlier).
Letter from Home: Hard Wear
This past week, toward the tail end of a backyard shed refurbishment project that had gotten a little out of hand, I found myself urgently in need of a simple box of nails. They had to be two inches long, a size I was freshly out of because I had used the last ones in the existing box to begin the process of putting up trim around the doors and windows. Does a backyard shed need trim on the inside? Well yes, sometimes.
Letter from Home: Time to Water
Where I grew up in the upper Midwest, summer evenings were long enough that as a young child I was often sent to bed before it was fully dark. It always seemed a cruel sentence to me; especially on the longest evenings in June, when I could still catch the sounds of usually older kids shouting or riding their bikes or otherwise enjoying the mild, evening air. Maybe it is this early experience that makes me such a fan of the time I spend watering.
Letter from Home: Seasonal Dysphoria
I know I am not alone in feeling that the past winter was a tough one in northern Arizona. Though it didn’t feature the epic snowpack amounts of 2023, it amounted to a good snow year—over 100 inches total in Flagstaff—and simply to a long haul of cold days, so that it wasn’t until well into April that we crested over 60 degrees. In March and into early April storms rolled in with the regularity of weekend tourist crowds, with varied combinations of rain and snow and sleet and graupel.
Way Beyond Grand
Buckskin Gulch Slot Canyons at Vermillion Cliffs. FOR HEROIC DRIVES AND SWEEPING VISTAS IN NORTHERN ARIZONA, DON’T LET NATIONAL PARK BOUNDARIES FENCE YOU IN. As cliche says, you shouldn't miss the Grand Canyon. If you're in northern Arizona, odds are you won’t. That big hole in the ground lures most travelers in this high country, beckoning them to the vistas of the South Rim or the loftier, more remote North Rim. And true enough, gazing into the famed abyss is an essential American experience.
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Letter from Home: Puzzled (A Confession)
Based on my recent and careful study of the social media zeitgeist, I have come to understand that public confession is the best and most efficacious way to combat private demons. Yet I am ill-equipped to do so there, as my personal engagement with social media tends to be pretty half-assed; I am a dabbler rather than a deep diver. So I have to find some other forum for the baring of my soul (plus, they pay me here).
Letter from Home: First Snows
It is hard to conjure up memories of childhood snows without a sneaking suspicion that they have been colored by the relentless mass-media momentum of the original “Frosty the Snowman” animated TV special, with its insistence on the sanctified magic of the winter’s first snowfall.
Letter from Home: Unrecorded
My first camera was a heavy, manually operated 35-millimeter model that my parents gave me when I was about 14 years old. It was far from cutting-edge, as newer cameras had built-in light meters and other battery-powered accessories; this one didn’t. But I was satisfied. An older camera conformed to my ideal of what photography was supposed to be.
Letter from Home: Stuffed
I will confess that I have not read the federal indictment, released last week, which accuses former President Trump of the improper possession and hiding of classified documents. But like many other people, I suspect, I did see the widely disseminated photos of heaps of banker’s boxes piled in various rooms in the Mar-a-Lago.
Letter from Home: Spring Time
The evening grosbeaks have been peeping and cheeping pretty much every morning in April, snacking on elm buds and drinking from the creek that’s been running alongside the tracks since the deep freeze of winter left us. The grosbeaks aren’t unusual, as they show up every spring, but the creek is.
Letter from Home: The Freeze, and the Thaw
The first day of spring—March 20, in this year—wasn’t very springlike here in Flagstaff, with rain and snow showers coming on a gusty day of clouds and near-freezing temperatures. More of the same, in other words. It’s been a harsh winter in northern Arizona.
Letter from Home: Mile Markers
By the time I got to The Drive, I’d gotten damn used to small-d driving: all those errands through suburban mall-land, returning home late through the mercury-vapor streets after nights out with friends in some Chicago neighborhood or other, the longer expeditions that took varied combinations of friends, often overnight, to visit someone at a college in some other Midwestern state—truck stop, rotgut coffee, pop another cassette mixtape into the player, return to the clean loneliness of the...
The Great Money Reset: Change Your Work, Change Your Wealth, Change Your Life
Magazine / The Great Money Reset: Change Your Work, Change Your Wealth, Change Your Life Book Bites Career Money Jill Schlesinger is an Emmy and Gracie Award winning CBS News Business Analyst, Certified Financial Planner, and podcast host of Jill on Money. Below, Jill shares 5 key insights from her new book, The Great Money Reset: Change Your Work, Change Your Wealth, Change Your Life. Listen to the audio version—read by Jill herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
Closing the Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential, and Your Paycheck
Magazine / Closing the Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential, and Your Paycheck Book Bites Career Women Kelli Thompson has coached and trained hundreds of women to trust themselves, lead with more confidence, and create a career they love. She is the founder of the Clarity & Confidence Women’s Leadership Program and a Stevie Award® winner for Women in Business—Coach of the Year.
Letter from Home: How to write this column
Every six weeks, when my time in the lineup comes up, the same question arises, or set of questions: What to write about, and how to write about it? So I went to the hot new tool of the moment: ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence writing software that has set academia abuzz, mainly in an alarmed way, because of its great potential to create plausible-sounding essays about most any topic.
Letter from Home: Normal
When I was a kid, normal was both a state of being and a place. The place was easier to define. It was a town, for one thing, and it could be found on one of those folded (paper!) highway maps that could be acquired at gas stations: there it was, smack-dab in the middle of the great flatness of Illinois.
Letter from Home: Emporiums
emporium n. Pl. -iums, -ia. [L f. Gk emporion, f. emporos merchant, per- to journey.] 1 A centre of commerce; a market. 2 A shop, esp. one that sells unusual or fancy goods. Chiefly joc. Of all the impacts of the COVID pandemic, one of the most enduring is—in my eyes—an increased awareness of the churning of stuff in the world or the way material goods do or do not move around in response to human needs and desires.
Letter from Home: Being Local
Propelled by the latest bout of COVID claustrophobia, we decided to spend a week this summer on the California coast. A day’s drive, no air travel; a rental within earshot of the surf. At times, the fog rolled in unexpectedly and shrouded the pine-oak woods around us in mystery, and even though we’d come from an unusually wet period in Arizona, my skin and lips felt different in the presence of all that airborne moisture.
Letter from Home: Currant time
Surely you know some irritating over-achiever—for who hasn’t? The annoying person who shows up in the classroom or kitchen or conference room, or on the athletic field, and seemingly without any effort at all pulls off a perfect meal or project or performance, showing up everyone else who has been working so very hard to accomplish at a lower level. The overachiever is Usain Bolt, Greta Garbo, Robert Johnson, all those with a seemingly magical ability that puts them in a league entirely their own.
The Red Hot Blues
Slickrock domes and washes of cream-colored sand, groves of tall pinon, blackbrush meadows-the long trail to Rainbow Bridge had not changed much, as far as I could tell, in the intervening more than 30 years. Not that I remembered it in much detail. When I first visited the place I was a newbie to the Southwest, gobsmacked by the scale of mountains and plains, in love with the sensations of experiencing new landscapes.
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